Due to their light weight, stability, and aesthetically pleasing appearance, tensegrity structures, also known simply as tensegrities, can be useful across a wide range of applications. For example, tensegrities can be utilized in the arts, architecture, robotics, and furniture design, in addition to other applications. The term tensegrity is a contraction of the words “tension” and “integrity,” and refers to the fact that properly designed tensegrities are stable under their own weight due to the interplay of tensile and compressive forces produced by their structural elements, such as struts and cables for example.
Although, as noted above, tensegrities can have many useful applications, their conventional design presents considerable challenges, which may have contributed to their limited adoption. For example, in the most general design case in which an arbitrary target geometry is to be substantially replicated as a tensegrity, the mixed continuous-discrete optimization problems requiring solution according to conventional design approaches present, at the very least, a high processing overhead, and may in many instances prove impracticable to solve. Moreover, due to the strict topological constraints imposed on tensegrities, and the high-dimensional parameter spaces and nonlinearity of their structural forces, the difficulty in designing tensegrity structures increases rapidly with the increasing complexity of the target geometry. Thus, the burdens associated with conventional design approaches tend to discourage the use of tensegrities in general, and in cases where they are implemented, tend to limit their designs to relatively simple geometries.